And your point is...

Friday 11 September 2009 11.39 EDT
First published on Friday 11 September 2009 11.39 EDT

There's a piece in the NYT this morning about how hatred of Obama is so great in Louisiana that the sinning senator, David Vitter, the Republican who got in hot water a couple years ago for doing business with a prostitute, is now on the rebound because he's attacking the unpopular president.

Surprise surprise. One day, in the great utopian future, the media will figure out that sex scandals don't always knock politicians out of office. In fact, the list of pols who survive them is longer than the list whose careers are ended by them.

But anyway, the real thing is this. The Times story uses as its main piece of evidence that Obama is an albatross for Democrats a special state senate election in the south-eastern part of the state. It involved one Republican and two Democrats. The Republican finished first, but did not get enough of the vote to avoid a run-off, so he then had to face the Democrat who finished second. The Republican attacked both Democrats on the grounds that they voted for Obama for president.

But what happened next? The Democrat won the run-off.

I'm under no illusion that white southerners will ever be admirers of the president. But this doesn't exactly support the alleged point of the article.

And one of these days, we're going to have to start talking about the thing we don't talk about here. You know. The r-word. Rhymes with place.

Would Congressman Wilson have shouted "you lie" at a white president? One can't prove this one way or the other. But remember, or consider, in case you haven't heard it yet - Wilson was one of only seven state senators, when he sat in that body in South Carolina, to vote to keep flying the Confederate battle flag on top of the state capitol. Remember - they didn't even start flying it until 1962, during the civil rights movement. Remember - the senate, scarcely a bunch of Obamaites, voted 36-7 against it.